Leaving: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

bed.
    “Where’s he sleep?” Easton asked.
    “He stays with me when he’s here.” Corbet closed the door firmly and didn’t offer any more explanation. He took them back to Ruby’s new room to get them set up.
    Within a week of their arrival, Ruby had her sewing machine running all day while Corbet went to his job at the docks. They’d enrolled Easton at McClymonds. The school was integrated, which he had never experienced, but still there were very few White children. Out of thirty-five students in his class, five were White, two were Chinese, and one Japanese.
    He quickly found his favorite class. His math teacher, Miss Claudia Grossbalm, was young and serious. She paced across the front of the room with her head down, her dress pressed against her body by the force of her movement, deep into her explanation of an algebraic equation as though she were rediscovering her own religious conviction; at times she would even raise the math book in the air like a Bible, revealing small stains of sweat under her arms. She was strict with the boys in the back and didn’t take any of their lip, strong and curt, the way Easton had never seen a White woman act before.
    “Quiet, Mr. Waters,” she chastised a boy whom most teachers ignored out of fear. But she continued with her lesson, and he had no opening to respond, for she was not confronting him, simply pushing aside an obstacle in the way of her mathematical quest.
    “Now!” She turned to the class suddenly, breathing hard through her nose and looking out over the faces with passionate and hopeful eyes. “Who can tell me how to find twenty-five percent of XY when X equals five and Y equals one-half X?” There was a silence so strong it sucked at the marrow of every student. Easton could not bear to see the slow transformation from rapture to despair on Miss Grossbalm’s face. He could not help but raise his hand.
    “Yes, Mr. Childers.” He stood, as he had been taught to do in Norma, and a few kids chuckled. He felt the eyes from the back row upon him, yet the smile of anticipation on Miss Grossbalm’s lips drew him on.
    “Point two five times five times two point five.”
    “Yes, and then?” She practically ran to the board to write out his equation.
    “Uppity nigger,” he heard from the back of the room. “Whitey.” He was lighter-skinned than most of his family, but he’d always seen that as a source of pride.
    Miss Grossbalm turned. “Mr. Waters, stand up.”
    “But it wasn’t me,” Charles Waters said without conviction. She never involved herself in a tug-of-war. If it wasn’t him, it was one of his lackeys.
    “Stand up and come here to the board to finish this equation.”
    At this challenge, Charles stood, pulled his shirt out of his pants, and swaggered up the aisle toward the front of the room where Miss Grossbalm held out the chalk. It took him a long time to make it to the front row. He forced a confident smile, but everyone knew he could not possibly solve the equation. As he passed Easton, he covered his mouth and coughed into his hand: “Daddy’s a homo.” The rest of the class laughed. Charles sneezed, “Up the ass.”
    Easton knew the time would come when he’d have to settle into the pecking order with the back-row boys, and the sooner he got that over with, the better. He grabbed Charles by the hair and brought his face down onto his knee with the solid force that ensured he and Charles would become close friends in the future. At that time, kids in Oakland didn’t carry knives like everyone did in Norma, so the whole class screamed when Easton pulled a blade out of his back pocket and brandished it toward the rest of the back row. Charles was still on the ground when Miss Grossbalm walked directly to Easton and took the knife from his hand. That’s when he knew he was in love. She led him by the wrist and walked him to the principal’s office.
    He was suspended for a day. It would have been much longer had Miss Grossbalm